Although space travel is currently just for the rich,
entrepreneurs will be capable of catering to a wider audience once
a commercial space station is in place-and that could be sooner
than you think. Space Island Group, based in West Covina,
California, has plans to build a privately funded space shuttle and
station, complete with hotels, restaurants and attractions. The
project costs between $1 billion and $2 billion per year.

"It's not a small venture thing," says Gene
Meyers, founder and president of Space Island Group. "But
it's still just a tiny slice of what NASA spends. We can do
this because we're building on the work NASA has already
done."

Meyers is enlisting the help of more than 150 engineers, many of
whom worked on the original space shuttle program in the '70s.
Space Island plans to build a fleet of 50 commercial shuttles at a
cost of $300 million each over the next 10 years. The shuttles will
each carry 100 people, and the first could be up and running by
2005, with the first commercial station fully operational by
2007.

Design plans for the station include connecting used shuttle
fuselages into one spinning space hub, an idea NASA first proposed
about 30 years ago. According to Meyers, entrepreneurs could rent
space on the commercial station for $25 per cubic foot, per
day-rates that would drop to $5 in the station's first three
years. In addition, Meyers estimates that by 2012, it could cost as
little as $25,000 for transportation and one week's stay in
space, meaning more space tourists and more entrepreneurial
opportunities. A space station, after all, isn't like a cruise
ship, where tourists get off at every port, so there's plenty
of business opportunities in keeping them occupied while
they're up there.

But it's the opportunities that aren't even available on
Earth that are truly exciting. "Anything that requires
micro-gravity to develop or manufacture would be a natural for any
type of space-based venture," says C.J. Wallington, professor
of a space tourism development class at the Rochester Institute of
Technology in Rochester, New York. Potential products include
computer chips with space-grown crystals or jewelry made from metal
alloys that exist only in zero gravity.

For now, you have to work with foreign governments if you want
to travel into space. Government regulations make it impossible for
NASA to participate in space tourism. Dennis Tito's trip was
arranged with the Russian government through Arlington,
Virginia-based Space Adventures. Currently, Russia charges a flat
fee of $20 million per flight.